It’s turned off and on by the sysctl machdep.isolated_user_pmap – and defaults to on for Intel CPUs. Buildworld tests show about a 4-5% performance hit, but that’s only one form of activity, measured, so there will surely be other effects.

Note that Spectre is not mitigated by this commit series, and as I understand it, cannot be realistically fixed in software.

SSH in DragonFly 5, by default, does not make a password authentication request on outgoing ssh sessions. You can manually add the option or change the config. Or use public keys, which is really the best idea if at all possible.

DragonFly 4.8 has been updated to 4.8.1, bringing in a lot of small fixes. Improved Intel video support and the virtio_scsi driver will be of most interest, I think. The 4.8.1 tag commit has all the details. You can update the normal way, and if you need an install image, I’ve uploaded them and they should appear at your local mirror.

Recent changes for virtualmachinesupport and the new powerd utility have been rolled into the release branch for DragonFly. They’ll probably be in the next point release, or you can rebuild a release machine now for immediate access.

Also mentioned in the update from Matthew Dillon, DragonFly-master users should upgrade carefully as DragonFly migrates to using LibreSSL in base, and dports-based LibreSSL in dports.

Because this always happens just after I create a DragonFly release, there’s a new version of OpenSSL. However, this is for version 1.0.2. 1.0.1 is what’s in the release, and it’s supported through the end of the year.

I’m a bit late on this, but: If you are using DragonFly-current, you will need to rebuild world. If you are on 4.4, this won’t matter until you go to 4.6, and you’d be rebuilding world and kernel for that anyway.

If you are using bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3) on a machine with Intel video, the i915 module has been renamed. This means you will probably need to rebuild xf86-video-intel from source to have it match. There should be a matching binary package soon.